Ask HN: Is “Liaison” a good name for an open source project?

[mvila]

I'm having trouble spreading the word about my new open source project, and I'm wondering if its name - Liaison - is not a terrible choice.

To give you some context, Liaison (https://liaison.dev) is a set of JavaScript/TypeScript libraries to simplify the development of full-stack apps, and the main idea is to reunite the frontend and the backend.

In French, a "liaison" means a "link" between people or things. I think it means more or less the same in English, but it doesn't seem to be commonly used.

I am French, so I cannot answer the following questions with certainty:

- Is the word "liaison" very uncommon in English? - Is it difficult to pronounce, spell, or remember? - Does it have a negative connotation?

If you are a native English speaker, could you please help me answer these questions?

[jart]

At first it sounded like isomorphic javascript, which is better as far as searchability is concerned. Then I read more about your project. Does this really use reflection to generate rpcs for all server-side data objects by default? Because that's really profound. I guess I never really considered before that the reason we design APIs is so we can tightly control what forms of communication the client is allowed to do, and that none of it would be necessary at all, if we could simply just trust the client. I hope the Internet shows your services the kindness they deserve.

[mvila]

By default, nothing is exposed. To make an attribute or a method accessible from the frontend, it must be explicitly exposed by using the `expose()` decorator.

[jart]

Ah thanks for clarifying. Generating schemas and APIs from @annotations / @decorators is a well established technique. How does that remove four layers from the tech stack?

[mvila]

In a nutshell:

- The frontend is "inherited" from the backend so there is no need to build an API server and an API client.

- The database is abstracted away by an ORM.

- The user interface can be encapsulated into the domain model.

If you are interested, you can read this article for more details: https://dev.to/mvila/full-stack-development-should-be-easier...

[jart]

What sort of tech stack do you run in production?

[mvila]

Any Node.js environment can run the backend. As for the database, Liaison supports only MongoDB for now, but more databases are expected to be supported in the future.

[exolymph]

It's not super difficult to spell but given that it's not very commonly used, a little on the difficult side in terms of spelling.

[mvila]

Thanks, exolymph. I thought so. I guess the "i" after "lia" seems a bit weird in English.

[byoung2]

In fact, before now I could have sworn it was spelled "liason"

[verdverm]

You might want to Google that spelling ;]

[mvila]

Interesting! It seems that both spelling are actually used...